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The first two thirds of the book were a chorus that I am all too familiar with: some men turn everything they touch into burning pain. Han Kang allows us to experience patriarchal violence both through the eyes of the men, and through the thoughts of the women they hurt. The book opens with a first-person view that made me feel the familiar nausea of realising that the women are trapped narcissistic men.

There's only one character whose inner thoughts we never read, except through her dreams. And, honestly, after the last third of the book, I feel like reading her thoughts would have been too much to bear. Perhaps even too much to imagine, as an author.

The silence of the main character feels like a different kind of violence. Just like "Greek Lessons", it feels to me like Han Kang portrays women fighting back at the men that wronged them (sometimes, with the complicity of other women) by barring them from hearing their voice.

After hearing Freud's work referenced so heavily, I read Beverley Clack's book with a hope to understand what Freud actually thought about matters such as transference, the death drive, and so on. In a way, I got what I wanted, but I was also left wanting more.

The first part of the book which describes Freud's life and his relationships with important people in his life is by far the part that I found most useful to my personal effort to envision Freud. The detail that he had an difficult professional relationship to men, but an open and collaborative one with women, was surprising - and maybe a little bit endearing? The tender feelings don't go far, though - not when the details of the ways in which Freud's perspective has often failed to note the abuse and the horrific entrenched practices directed at young women at the hands of men who controlled their fate.

Reading this book as anything other than a cis man may give rise to thoughts about the failings of psychotherapy. However, I am also convinced that the book - and Freud's work, in general - is worth reading, in no small part for the usefulness of understanding the emergence of ideas which later shaped a better, more egalitarian exploration of ideology and the self.

I read the last couple of hundred pages in the company of dear people. I could have stopped reading and resumed by cozy social evening, but I could not bare to not know how this book ends. What happens all the way to the point where the author decided that enough has happened.

This was an extremely good read. For me, what stood out most was the depth of emotion, turmoil, the nuanced decisions of each character. There was no point where one of them felt "secondary". Some stories contain characters who feel like they are meant to provide context for "the main characters" to develop. This book did nothing of the sort.

I felt waves of powerful, consuming emotions, while reading this. I've had nightmares and vivid dreams every night while I was reading it and I fully expect that fragments will populate my subconscious and bubble to the surface for a long time to come.

There are frequent descriptions, in the book, of moments when one character is within the body of another. I often felt I was inhabiting the fictional body of these people who didn't exist, but who were vivid and vibrant in my mind. Maybe those parts of the book described empathy, projected desire, or allowed one character to interact with another in a way that wasn't possible in the physical world.

Gender and sexuality, in the book, were depicted in such a realistic way that I finally felt someone "got it". These aspects of the characters were never addressed explicitly, but they existed solely in the social interactions between them and - most probably - in how they were perceived by readers.

I loved that the author was never prescriptive about what a reader was meant to feel. I loved the ambiguity, the foreshadowing, the hints.